Last year, Canadian Business magazine ranked Moncton as the #1 place in Canada to do business. Less than a year later, the community has dropped to 13th place. How can that happen? What fundamentally changed in the past 9 months?
Not much. CB uses a very subjective model to determine ‘best place for business’.
Here’s another weird quote from the article:
Also, the magazine’s authors noted that the boom in the call centre industry appears to be over.”Existing ones are expanding and new ones are still coming”…but it is not as prolific as in past years,” said Pamela MacFarlane, research director with Colliers International (Atlantic) Inc in the report. “The current government is not pushing in the same way.”
Now, I am the first to hammer the government for lack of economic development effort but this particular comment is a bit out of place given that Asurion just announced a 300 person expansion, CenterBeam in Saint John is doubling in size and SNC-Lavalin just announced a major call centre in Campbellton.
We have to all be a little bit suspect of these ‘rankings’ anyway. I have the same concerns about the overused KPMG study that the Feds pay an egregious sum of money to have done every other year. The first year this study was done, St. John’s came out #1 among over 100 global cities for low costs. Then, I suspect the Quebec contingent got cranky because the next time the study was done they changed the ‘criteria’ and presto two Quebec communities came out on top.
It’s a bit unfortunate but true that most consultants will tell the client what they want to hear – and changing the ‘criteria’ on which the report is based is one way to do this in good conscience.